Your clients can buy most of what’s named here without you. What decides your exposure is whether they can finish the job once they’ve bought it.
7
8
1
Replaced, Repriced and Defensible, left to right. 16 marketing service lines, read against a census of 122 AI companies selling into them.
Ranked
7 of 16 service lines your clients can now handle without you
Every one of these service lines has companies selling that work straight to your clients. They’re ordered by how many.
1Creative & graphic design11
2Market & audience research11
3Video production & editing10
4Influencer marketing9
5Social media management9
6Email marketing & lifecycle / CRM8
7Content writing & copywriting7
Tap a service line to see the companies behind its number
Click a service line to see the companies behind its number
Replaced
7 service lines
Work your clients can now do themselves.
Repriced
8 service lines
Work that still needs you, only cheaper.
Defensible
1 service line
No AI substitute for the work itself.
For a line marked Replaced, the firm can defend it, repackage it, migrate the revenue, or harvest what’s left. The five tests that pick one are on the Three Shifts page.
What does this Index measure?
Every competitor in this census is selling today. Some sell software, and some sell the finished deliverable the way an agency does. What decides a service line’s exposure is whether the brand can get that deliverable without the agency. Where the brand can, we mark the line replaced. Where the brand would still need someone to run the tool and check its output, the agency keeps the client at fewer hours, so we mark the line repriced. Open a service line below to see the companies attacking the work it bills for.
Where did the companies come from?
The field was built by systematic web research, one sweep per agency service line, plus a completeness pass for what the sweeps missed. A company earns a place only with a sourced account of what it sells and a funding or traction figure; anything we could not tie to a primary source was dropped, not estimated. That produced 122 distinct companies. One company often sells into several service lines, and a product counts under the company that owns it.
How was each company placed?
A company is placed on a service line when it targets the work that line bills for, and the verdict sits on the line rather than on the company. The Index carries no tag for who buys a product: a vendor’s marketing names who it courts, not who can buy.
What counts as a service line?
A company is attached to a service line only when it targets the work that line bills for. That leaves 16 service lines and 128 placements, naming all 122 companies in the field.
What does this Index not cover?
Agency operations tooling is excluded as adjacent to the business rather than a threat to a service line: a project-management or client-reporting platform is out, while a product that makes the billed deliverable stays in even when it also handles admin. Some service lines are under-covered by the sweeps, so the counts are a floor and the real number is higher. The Index treats every service line the same, because weighting one by its share of an agency’s book would be our judgment rather than a sourced figure.
How should I read it?
A competitor named here isn’t lost revenue. We read shipped product and live service as of mid-2026, so the Index shows who is coming for the work, not billing that has already moved.
This is a living census, not a closed report. If a company is missing, sits under the wrong service line, carries a verdict you can argue with, or has a better primary source, send it with a link. Useful for anyone who sees a gap in a service line they know, and for vendors who want the record accurate.